Of all the things a Walmart janitor comes across, meth labs are probably low on the list. Boaz Police say a maintenance worker cleaning the women’s restroom found pseudoephedrine pills and a plastic water bottle with residue in the bottom. Managers contacted police, who recovered what Chief Terry Davis called a one-pot ‘shake and bake’ type lab. “That kind of blew my mind when I read the report,” Davis said. “We’ve found a lot of shake and bake meth labs in different places but never inside a business.” Police said it takes about 15 to 30 minutes to cook low-quality methamphetamine using this method, and they do not know if the culprit finished the product.

The raid on Oaksterdam has just about everyone in local politics engaging in a little head-scratching: What possible reason would the Obama administration have to crack down on medical marijuana in an election year? How does it help the president, who will be facing an unsettled and angry electorate in a still-tough economy, to alienate the pot smoking liberals of the world, who were at one point among his most loyal constituents? What a fucking idiot.

According to researchers from the University of Gothenburg, many people log on as soon as they turn on their computers and its turning into a full blown addiction. They also discovered that people in low income groups and the poorly educated are at a greater risk. Of the ~800 million Facebook users, 85% of them log on daily, and at least half of them open Facebook before anything else when getting on the internet. So why does Facebook make people less happy with their lives? It would seem that many people fear that they are not ‘on top of things’ if they do not regularly check the site, and 25% say they fill ‘ill at ease’ if they can’t log in regularly. Users with low income and low education use Facebook more than other groups. Within these groups, users who spend more time on Facebook also report feeling less happy and less content with their lives. This relationship is also present for women, but not for men.

An Edwardsville police officer was charged on Monday for surreptitiously taking pictures of three women at a Glen Carbon tanning salon. Michael R. Collins was charged with three felony counts of unauthorized video recording. A female customer accused Collins, who was in the next room, of taking pictures with his cellphone over the wall while she prepared to tan, according to the Madison County state’s attorney. The incident happened on Tuesday at Image Sun Tanning Center in the 6600 block of Edwardsville Crossing Drive.

☆ Ex-Santa Fe cop accused of graphic sex talk in squad car

He was supposed to be supervising other cops in the field, but one Santa Fe Police Department sergeant was caught on his own dash cam video having a graphic sexual conversation with himself. 4 On Your Side spent over a month requesting and reviewing dash cam videos taken from former Sgt. Mike Eiskant’s patrol car. One video shows Eiskant’s vehicle pointed toward Cerillos Road in the middle of the day. Audio from the recording depicts moans, then the unmistakable sound of a zipper. Eiskant is alone in his squad car, and it sounds like he may be masturbating while looking at a picture of a naked woman on his cell phone and texting. At one point in the video he says, “Oh show me those big beautiful breasts baby.” The sex talk, recorded in broad daylight goes on for nearly ten more minutes.

☆ Kickbacks and Other Abuses “Rampant” in Drug Testing Industry

A multimillion dollar settlement paid by a Massachusetts drug test laboratory for an illegal kickback scheme is the latest chapter in an industry bedeviled by criminal investigations, lawsuits, finger pointing and ruthless competition. Calloway Laboratories agreed last week to pay $20 million to settle state charges that it defrauded Medicaid with a kickback scheme that included sham companies, fake doctor signatures, and excessive urine tests for drug addicts.

Under the “operation game over” initiative, manufacturers who operate online video-gaming networks, like the one for “Call of Duty,” have agreed to cross check their customer accounts with the New York state sex offender registry to remove predators trolling game sites. The companies participating include Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Warner Brothers, Disney, Blizzard Entertainment and Electronic Arts. “We must ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for predators,” Schneiderman said.

According to Bryant, the boy, a kindergarten student at Barnum School, had come to school carrying Roman’s jacket. When it came time to make his presentation in class, Bryant said the boy opened the jacket and showed off to his classmates 10 small plastic bags, each containing five folds of heroin. He said the teacher quickly grabbed the bags away from the student and notified the principal, who then called police.

It’s not as famous as Grilled Cheesus or the Nun Bun, but the image a James Island woman found Friday on the back of a dead cownose ray may be one day. “I just kind of thought it looked like a bearded homeless man,” said Erica Scheldt, 24. “But when I posted pictures on Instagram, one of my friends was like, ‘That’s Jesus.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God! You’re right!’ ”

The reason is we have now reached a moment where four words — the earth is full — will define our times. This is not a philosophical statement; this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology. There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion — that we’re living beyond our means. The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network, for example, calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy. In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50% more Earth than we’ve got.

A Northern California teen who made national news when she and her high school teacher moved in together says she has broken off the relationship following allegations that he sexually abused another student. Jordan Powers, 18, told ABC News that when her now former boyfriend, Christopher Hooker, called her from jail she told him, “We’re done.” Hooker, 41, was arrested Friday on suspicion of sexually abusing a different student more than a decade ago. After being booked on one count of oral copulation with a minor, he made a brief court appearance during which a judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

The use of cocaine by FDR for “sinus treatments” is not surprising. We know, from readily available information that from mid-1939, FDR saw McIntire on a daily basis for “sinus treatments”. I believe the only incorrect assumption is that cocaine was being used to treat FDR for chronic sinusitis. Cocaine is a powerful anesthetic and vasoconstrictor and was being used to combat the pain brought on by the constant irritation from therapy. With the goal of affecting a slow cosmetic removal of the cancerous lesion, FDR had innumerable painful procedures over his left eye and in his sinuses, performed by McIntire Between early 1940 and late 1941. Daily use of cocaine obviously leads to addiction, ceasing use, brings about a”rebound” phenomenon, a nasal swelling and intense congestion begging for more cocaine. Mcintire had no problem obtaining cocaine for medical use.

A newspaper in Mexico is detailing Sunday’s “burning of the Jews,” an annual tradition in Coita, a small town in the state of Chiapas. As part of the custom, locals spend the middle of their Holy Week making Jewish effigies — a reference to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus before his crucifixion. The fake Jews are then displayed for three days in different parts of the town, serving as an example of poor conduct. They’re ultimately paraded through the streets on Easter Sunday, with local children assigned to stand in front of them and collect money for flammable materials.

Authorities say a former New York woman pretended to have terminal cancer so she could have lavish wedding reception and honeymoon. The Times Herald-Record reports an Orange County Grand jury has indicted 25-year-old Jessica Vega, a former Montgomery resident, with grand larceny and scheme to defraud. According to the indictment, Vega accepted thousands of dollars in donated services and goods after claiming in 2010 that she was dying of leukemia. The newspaper ran a story on Vega’s wedding wish. She married Michael O’Connell in May 2010 and the couple spent their honeymoon in Aruba. Four months later, O’Connell told the newspaper that Vega was faking the illness.

This 25 year old woman has never given birth and has no history of STIs. Each photo was taken at approximately 10:00 pm every day starting the first day of her menstrual cycle. For the duration of this project, she used condoms as her birth control method so as not to introduce semenal fluid into the photoshoot. She did not use tampons or mooncups during her menstruation either. This cycle is of normal/average length for her, about 33 days. Her cycle’s follicular phase (variable number of days preovulation) lasts until about day 20 or 21. Her fertile phase lasts from days 13 to 21 with ovulation on day 20. Her luteal (postovulation) phase is 13 days long (12-16 days is the norm and is not variable in a normal cycle).

The Declaration of Independence recognizes all three freedoms as stemming from our humanity. So, what happens if you can speak freely, but the government officials at whom your speech is aimed refuse to hear you? And what happens if your right to associate and to petition the government is confined to areas where those of like mind and the government are not present? This is coming to a street corner near you.

☆ 19 Things That The Talking Heads On Television Are Being Strangely Silent About

Unfortunately, most Americans seem perfectly content with the “infotainment” that they are getting from the major news networks, so major changes to the mainstream media are not likely to happen any time soon. For those wanting something different, you will have to seek out alternative sources of news (such as this website) that are willing to discuss the truly earth shattering events that are continually taking place all over the globe. So what are some of the things that the mainstream media has been ignoring? The following are 19 things that the talking heads on television have been strangely silent about….

New DNA tests suggest the owner of a British fertility clinic may have fathered as many as 600 children, while keeping his donations a secret. And in an even stranger twist, one of his newly discovered offspring says the man’s belief in eugenics may have been behind the decision.

Just look at those perverts, engaging in the age old pervy tradition of rubbing stomachs on boobs and getting off in public with hot elbow-to-elbow action. Or, you know, look at those two guys just trying to get to school, or get home from work, and who are probably as upset about the train being crowded as you are. Yes, groping people on the train is bad, criminal even. But you know what else is bad? Portraying men as sexual predators simply because they boarded a crowded train and someone near them is a woman.

A 30-year-old former school teacher who allegedly produced child pornography has replaced former Al Qaeda chief Usama bin Laden on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list.

There is something largely missing from popular cinema and music these days, and that’s Satan. I might be sounding old-fashioned – but Satanism had some style. While 1969 turned many things bad – Hells Angels, heroin, peyote, Charles Manson, Dick Van Dyke – Kenneth Anger’s pact with the devil was reaping psychedelic fruit. Anger was a powerful force. His grasp of the symbolic – reckoned with the Satanic creed of ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ – alchemised into works such as Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother, and dealt the decade a final score. And along the way he also scared some people. In fact, his “awesomely evil 11-minute masterpiece” Invocation – starring himself, Anton LaVey (the High Priest of the Church of Satan), Charles Manson sidekick Bobby Beausoleil (later to serve life imprisonment with Manson for first degree murder), and featuring documentary footage from a satanic cat funeral, a ceremonial skull smoking session, a mummified psychic and a synthesized Moog soundtrack

Showing no emotion, LaMere, 22, spoke briefly about how he ordered the substance online but didn’t know it was illegal. Handing out what turned out to be the drug 2C-E at the party, he saw Trevor Robinson, 19, snort it and “start to have a bad experience.” Sometime later, LaMere said, “I was in an ambulance, and Trevor ended up dying.” Ten others who took the drug became ill and were hospitalized. LaMere was charged with felony third-degree murder last March. The high-profile case prompted heightened awareness about the dangers of synthetic drugs, which are easily bought off the Internet with buyers never knowing exactly what they’re getting. It also provoked a highly unusual letter from the top levels of federal prosecution that put pressure on local prosecutors to seek a tough sentence.

Vending machines normally cure the munchies with shelves laden with chips and chocolates, but one being trialled in West Auckland may well cause them. New Zealand’s first cannabis club, the Daktory, has been using the machine – which sells one gram bags of cannabis for $20 – at it’s New Lynn headquarters to avoid any of their members being charged with dealing the Class C drug. The hired vending machine is a standard dispenser but has been filled with cannabis rather than confectionery or toys.

A Treasure Coast man walked into the Port St. Lucie Police Department on Monday carrying marijuana plants and seeds, saying “he wanted to turn himself in to do the right thing,” according to an arrest report. Port St. Lucie police said Michael Cabral entered the station carrying 12 marijuana plants, seeds and drug paraphernalia.

Prescription drug abuse is the new scourge of rural America. It now leads to more deaths in the United States than heroin and cocaine combined, and rural residents are nearly twice as likely to overdose on pills than people in big cities, according to the Centers for Disease Control. While methamphetamine addiction has long been associated with small towns, prescription painkillers have overtaken meth as the most abused drugs in places such as southern Indiana, according to local authorities. Opana is the hot new prescription drug of abuse, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Motivated by a desire to make easy money, many of these SGF head into the city, but because they are uneducated, they turn to a life of prostitution. While prostitution has bought considerable income to some, sometimes they might even make 3000 RMB ($476 US) a month, the frequency of “pick-ups” and an addiction to online games, has made this occupation taxing upon the body.

It also describes the purchase of “multiple motor vehicles, including a $100,000 motor home purchased by Trinity Broadcasting as a mobile residence for director Janice Crouch’s dogs”. Directors of the network are also accused of misusing funds to cover up sex scandals, including the alleged “cover-up and destruction of evidence concerning a bloody sexual assault involving Trinity Broadcasting and affiliated Holy Land Experience employees; the cover-up of director Janice Crouch’s affair with a staff member at the Holy Land Experience; the cover-up of director Paul Crouch’s use of Trinity Broadcasting funds to pay for a legal settlement with Enoch Lonnie Ford (a former TBN employee who said he had a homosexual affair with [founder] Paul Crouch)”.

A PRIEST has denied knowing how gay porn images appeared on a screen during a presentation he was giving to parents of children preparing for First Communion. Fr Martin McVeigh was setting up the PowerPoint display when the explicit sex scenes flashed up on the screen. He was about to give a talk to the parents of First Communicants but abandoned the presentation after the pornographic images appeared. One of those present said the pictures appeared on the screen after the priest put a USB memory stick into the computer at St Mary’s School in Pomeroy, Co Tyrone. “There were plenty of shocked faces. There’s a lot of parents very angry about it.”

Given the intimate nature of location information, the government should have to obtain a warrant based upon probable cause to track cell phones. That is what is necessary to protect Americans’ privacy, and it is also what is required under the constitution. But is that what the police do? The answer is it depends. Law enforcement agencies’ tracking policies are in a state of chaos, with different towns following different rules — or in some cases, having no rules at all.

Susan Dhliwayo was stunned when she pulled her car over recently to pick up a group of male hitchhikers and they refused to get in. The reason? They feared being raped. Sensational reports of gangs of beautiful women picking up male travellers to have sex and harvest their sperm in condoms have gripped Zimbabwe in a dizzying mix of taboos, rituals and the downright bizarre. “Now, men fear women. They said: ‘we can’t go with you because we don’t trust you’,” 19-year-old Dhliwayo recounted. Local media have reported victims of the highway prowlers being drugged, subdued at gun or knife point — even with a live snake in one case — given a sexual stimulant and forced into repeated sex before being dumped on the roadside. The sperm hunters first surfaced in the local press in 2009 but police have only arrested three women, found with a plastic bag of 31 used condoms in October. The attacks have continued since they were nabbed for allegedly violating 17 men.

Megaupload wants the servers back to help with its defense, but with most of its assets seized by the federal government, it can’t pay for them. Carpathia would normally wipe the servers and lease them to new clients, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that legitimate users of the site be allowed to retrieve their personal data first. The Motion Picture Association of America doesn’t want this to happen without assurances that its copyrighted content won’t be retrieved and distributed again; besides, it might want the servers for a future lawsuit of its own. And the federal government yesterday announced that the servers “may contain child pornography,” which would render them “contraband” and limit Carpathia’s options for dealing with them.

The chances are good that sugar is a bigger part of your daily diet than you may realize which is why our story tonight is so important. New research coming out of some of America’s most respected institutions is starting to find that sugar, the way many people are eating it today, is a toxin and could be a driving force behind some of this country’s leading killers, including heart disease. As a result of these findings, an anti-sugar campaign has sprung up, led by Dr. Robert Lustig, a California endocrinologist, who believes the consumption of added sugars has plunged America into a public health crisis.

Infowars.com and Prisonplanet.tv proudly presents Alex Jones’ sit down interview with Billy Corgan, founder of the rock band, “The Smashing Pumpkins”. During this incredible conversation, Alex and Billy discuss the impact social media has on the music business, the role of the musician in society, the ever evolving left-right paradigm, the occupy wall street movement, and the noticeable spiritual awakening that threatens the very core of the globalist agenda.

Crystal Cox, a Montana woman who calls herself an “investigative journalist” was slapped with a $2.5-million judgment last year for defaming an investment firm and one of its lead partners. Cox had taken control of the Google footprint of Obsidian Finance and its principal Kevin Padrick by writing hundreds of posts about them on dozens of websites she owned, inter-linking them in ways that made them rise up in Google search results; it ruined Obsidian’s business due to prospective clients being put off by the firm’s seemingly terrible online reputation. After Obsidian sued Cox, she contacted them offering her “reputation services;” for $2,500 a month, she could “fix” the firm’s reputation and help promote its business. (In some circles, we call that ”extortion.”)

Distasteful comments and online insults are a mainstay of many social networks and online comment boards, but a new bill passed in Arizona could send people who “annoy or offend” to jail for up to six months.

An iPhone app that in effect allowed users to stalk women nearby using location-based social networking service Foursquare has been pulled from the iTunes app store by its developer after an outcry. The “Girls Around Me” app used publicly available data from the check-in service Foursquare to show where women had checked in nearby. Foursquare then yanked the Girls Around Me app’s access to its data. This, in turn, led to the app’s developer removing it from iTunes as it did not work properly.

The device was discovered by authorities near the cockpit of Southwest Airlines Flight 157 after arriving from Kansas City shortly before 4PM on Sunday. The device looked like a cell phone attached to a remote control car with some exposed wires protruding. The TSA evacuated gates 3 through 15 as a precautionary measurement against the “deadly” science project. In all, 11 people were detained in connection with the device. The incident caused ongoing flight delays at the Dallas airport, including three that had to be diverted.

H.R. 3523, a piece of legislation dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short), has been created under the guise of being a necessary implement in America’s war against cyberattacks. But the vague verbiage contained within the pages of the paper could allow Congress to circumvent existing exemptions to online privacy laws and essentially monitor, censor and stop any online communication that it considers disruptive to the government or private parties. Critics have already come after CISPA for the capabilities that it will give to seemingly any federal entity that claims it is threatened by online interactions, but unlike the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Acts that were discarded on the Capitol Building floor after incredibly successful online campaigns to crush them, widespread recognition of what the latest would-be law will do has yet to surface to the same degree.

☆ NBC News regrets editing of Trayvon shooting call

The “Today” show’s segment ran as: “Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” The full conversation ran as: “Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about. Dispatcher: OK, and this guy – is he black, white or Hispanic? Zimmerman: He looks black.” NBC News is owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.

Israel’s health ministry says the country now has the world’s highest per capita rate of medical marijuana use. Around 9,000 Israelis with serious injuries or illness have access to prescription cannabis and doctors there are learning more about the benefits of the plant, that go beyond pain relief.

Earlier this week, I came across some amazing live go-go videos from the late 80’s and early 90’s on YouTube. Growing up near D.C. (I lived an hour away), I can remember as a kid on one particular occasion seeing a flurry of kids in go-go bands playing on every corner, homemade junk percussion in tow and some insanely intense, rich grooves. It’s the sub-genre’s distinctive rhythms that drive the music into something focused almost purely on the percussive interplay and call-and-response participation; describing the sound is difficult to put into words, but once you hear it, you know what go-go is.

Restyling of the cat. Coloring or dying costs $15,000 and must be repeated every 3 months. Therefore, $60,000 a year.

Spanish police arrested 22 suspected pimps who allegedly used violence to force women into prostitution and tattooed them with bar codes as a sign of ownership, officials said Saturday. Police are calling the gang the “bar code pimps.” Officers freed one 19-year-old woman who had been beaten, held against her will and tattooed with a bar code and an amount of money — €2,000 (about $2,650) — which investigators believe was the debt the gang wished to extort before releasing her. The woman had also been whipped, chained to a radiator and had her hair and eyebrows shaved off, according to an Interior Ministry statement. Thanks Jasmine

Homosexual serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who sexually abused his dead victims’ corpses has proved he can be a productive member of society by helping blind children learn science. Nilsen murdered at least 15 men and boys between 1978 and 1983 by strangling or drowning them before storing their bodies for sexual purposes and possibly eating parts of them. The corpses were eventually dismembered, fed to wild animals, burned on bonfires or flushed down the toilet. Nilsen has been in prison for almost 30 years serving eight life sentences, his minimum tariff of 25 years was overruled by the Home Secretary and Nilsen has been told he will never be eligible for parole. But this week it has come to light that the nefarious murderer, who was nicknamed the ‘Kindly Killer’ has been helping blind children to read for years.

A new surveillance camera by Hitachi Kokusai Electric can look at footage that contains an image of someone, either still or video, and then search other video or still images on file for other instances of that same face. In so doing, it can search, process and display up to thirty six million faces in just one second. Each hit is displayed immediately in its native format, i.e. still or video, in thumbnail form, which its makers say, allows the camera to display the actions of a person prior to, or even after, being seen by the surveillance camera. All they need do is click on the thumbnail to watch the video play.

You can add this one to the short but growing list of employers demanding access to Facebook accounts. After refusing to give her Facebook password to her supervisors, Kimberly Hester was fired by Lewis Cass Intermediate School District from her job as an aide to Frank Squires Elementary in Cassopolis, Michigan. She is now fighting a legal battle with the school district. This all started in April 2011, when Hester was using Facebook on her own time (when she wasn’t working at the school). She jokingly posted a picture of a co-worker’s pants around her ankles and a pair of shoes, with the caption “Thinking of you.” A parent and Facebook friend of Hester’s saw the photo and complained to the school. A few days later, Lewis Cass ISD superintendent Robert Colby asked her three times for access to her Facebook account. Hester refused each of the district superintendent’s requests.

TacoCopter is an idea whose time has come. Quadcopters plus tacos plus a delivery service equals a college student’s dream, and with it, rampant speculation across the web. Around since last July, the TacoCopter website suddenly grabbed the web’s attention days ago with its claim that they will take your order via a smartphone and deliver tacos straight to your location with GPS-guided, unmanned quadcopters.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program

Filling in for Matt Lauer on Friday’s NBC Today, co-host Hoda Kotb made a bizarre proclamation about race relations in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting: “Skittles obviously has become really kind of a symbol in the whole Trayvon Martin case. A symbol of racial injustice. You see people holding up the bags of Skittles in their hands and it clearly means something.”

Given its participants, “Beat Bop” is a recording with mystique virtually encoded in its DNA. Highly collectable in its elusive original Tartown Records’ incarnation thanks to Basquiat’s unmistakable work on its picture sleeve, the 10-minute masterpiece’s trippy, reverb-bathed post-punk funk – unforgettably punctuated by Rammel’s mutant nasal rhyme forays (or “gangster duck” style) – epitomized the experimental ethos of early ’80s downtown New York. A time when hip-hop’s dissemination from the Bronx across neighborhoods, train lines, boroughs and well beyond put the world on notice: shit was about to change in irrefutable ways.

In the 1940s, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found his patients would recall seemingly random information – the smell of cookies for instance – when he stimulated different brain areas with electric shocks. Two studies have now found evidence to support the memory storage theory that Penfield stumbled across. The research, in mice, even demonstrates that it is possible to manipulate brain cells to create false memories. Mark Mayford of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, and colleagues genetically engineered mice so that neurons that fired would fire again when the brain was injected with a drug.

“It was extremely, extremely pornographic image,” customer Gloria Berg says. “I think even the word ‘pornographic’ doesn’t cover it. I have never watched pornography, so I don’t know what else you can see there, but to me, I really felt extremely violated.” Berg was inside the store with her son and his children. She says they were looking at the store’s display of 55-inch screen smart televisions when a pornographic photo of a man and woman suddenly popped up. She says the image stayed up for several minutes before the manager came over and took it down, and by then, several horrified families had seen it. She says the manager told her someone had used the store’s WI-FI to upload the image to the TV’s.

A recent flurry of eruptions on the sun did more than spark pretty auroras around the poles. NASA-funded researchers say the solar storms of March 8th through 10th dumped enough energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years.

“THE POWER DRUG” An in-depth analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture being disturbed by noise. This reveals a lot more detail should you wish to scrutinise a favourite scene like the single dolly shot in A Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell makes a circuit of the “disc-bootick” before chatting up a couple of devotchkas.

A Clockwork Orange has attracted more than its share of controversy, both as book and later as movie. Little wonder then that, when the film was attacked in the New York Times op-ed pages as an example of what the author, Fred Hechinger, called ‘the voice of fascism’, no less an exigiter of the film than Stanley Kubrick himself joined in the debate. Usually reticent regarding his personal interpretations, Kubrick, in this instance, reveals himself to be a passionate exponent of specific thematic ideas, and the way in which film can be used to exposit them. It all began with a relatively harmless promotional piece; from the January 4, 1972 issue of The New York Times

March 17th, Fujian province Ningde city, local residents while hiking discovered an ancient body wearing dynastic clothing embroidered with what appears to be dragons and called the police. Investigations revealed that it was related to the grave robbing of a government official who had served the Qing Emperor Guangxu (1882 AD) in his 8th year, and the body had been casually cast aside by the grave robber. According to reports, this is the highest ranking and most well preserved mummified body of a Qing era government official discovered locally. [Above] March 19th, Fujiang Ningde Xiapu county, the little pavilion of the old tomb that was robbed. This 1882-built construct is one of 4 “Phoenix” tomb rooms, which presently have all been robbed. 130 years ago, tombs were divided into 4 rooms, a household tomb, where two couples were interred.

Over the course of a year, 29-year-old Amine El Khalifi, who was clearly mentally ill and often high on cocaine and other drugs, was persuaded by an FBI informant to agree to attack the U.S. Capitol. Because El Khalifi didn’t have a gun, a bomb or a car, the FBI informant graciously offered to provide him all three – and thus El Khalifi was driven to the U.S. Capitol building by the FBI, handed a gun and a bomb, and then arrested as an “al Qaeda operative.” Khalifi was best known for his years of selling drugs and strutting through D.C. nightclubs in designer suits, living a playboy lifestyle. But two years ago, while dating a Muslim woman of Bulgarian and Turkish descent, El Khalifi embraced Islam and became religious, friends said. After the relationship ended, the girlfriend, obviously disgruntled, contacted the FBI and suggested her ex-boyfriend might be a good target for a frame-up.

The patch includes an image of a knight in a Crusade’s tunic, eating what appears to be a large ham hock, and lest there be any confusion — a translation in Arabic. They haven’t gone unnoticed. The website Muslim Awakening, posts a picture of what appears to be a German soldier with the patch adhered to his combat uniform.

This is profound and disturbing. There was a “drill” planned for March 20, 2012 in Mexico for a 7.9M earthquake “simulation”…. also on a separate note.. Barack Obamas daughter was at the epicenter on spring break: WTH is going on?!

A Minnesota high school student who lined up a porn actress to be his senior prom date will not be allowed to take the adult star to the dance, FoxNews.com has learned. Mike Stone, 18, of Oakdale, Minn., sent hundreds of tweets this week to adult film stars asking them to accompany him to the May 12 dance at Tartan High School. Two actresses, Emy Reyes and Megan Piper, soon responded, with Reyes saying, “I would love tooo” [sic] and Piper agreeing to attend if Stone covered her travel costs from Los Angeles. But Stone’s dream date won’t happen, according to school district officials.

My main reason for doing this interview is as a member of E.F.A., whose main tenet is “Equality For All”, meaning all creatures. This means that we have many activities and aims (visit www.equalityforall.net for details) including supporting “extreme” expressions of inter-species love. By “extreme” I mean including sexual expressions, but we have absolutely no tolerance for forced sexual interaction with any species, or inflicting pain of any sort. In that sense I support zoophilia with any animal – if done sensitively and painlessly.

The actor has body art in the form of a dolphin just below his right hip, perilously close to his bottom. He allegedly opted for the dolphin to cover up an ex-high school girlfriend’s name.

Imagine catching up with your texts, social networking and perhaps the news without having to log on to a computer or even glance at a smartphone. Messages and images would simply appear in front of your eyes, generated by a computerised contact lens. Of course, you may not always want to be bothered by such messages if you are doing anything so quaint as – for instance – reading a book or going out walking and enjoying the scenery. But until now the concept of info-vision – the ability to stream information across a person’s field of vision – had belonged to the realms of science fiction, featuring in films such as the Terminator series or TV shows such as Torchwood. However, scientists have developed a prototype lens that could one day provide the wearer with all kinds of hands-free information. It could also be used to display directions and TV programmes.

Researchers led by Prof. Sébastien Sauvé of the University of Montreal’s Department of Chemistry have discovered that traces of caffeine are a useful indicator of the contamination of our water by sewers. “E coli bacteria is commonly used to evaluate and regulate the levels of fecal pollution of our water from storm water discharge, but because storm sewers systems collect surface runoff, non-human sources can contribute significantly to the levels that are observed,” Sauvé explained. “Our study has determined that there is a strong correlation between the levels of caffeine in water and the level of bacteria, and that chemists can therefore use caffeine levels as an indicator of pollution due to sewerage systems.”

Legalization used to be the rallying cry of stoners alone. Not anymore. In Latin America, leaders seem to be reaching a new consensus about the drug war: it has failed, and it’s time for a new solution. Most say that foreign demand for cocaine and marijuana is the underlying problem. If American, Europeans and others stopped buying the drugs, the vast black-market for the trade wouldn’t exist. The drug traffickers wouldn’t be able to charge huge profits, and they wouldn’t be able to afford the massive weaponry and build the network of informants, enforcers, dealers and mules that allow them to sustain their production and distribution supply chain. But you can’t exactly presto demand away. Unless, the reasoning goes, you just legalize the drugs. Sell them over the counter for a reasonable price. Undercut the illegal market. Give the farmers who grow the stuff good jobs, free of fear, and give governments a share in the drug profits by taxing them.

Drug-dealing does not come naturally to me. But gradually, the opportunity created by the ongoing shortage of Adderall IR (and its generic equivalents) gets impossible to ignore. Strict limits govern the supply of the drug’s ingredients (chiefly, amphetamine), and a number of manufacturers have already hit their caps—a reality of which I’m made aware after trying a dozen city pharmacies and learning they’ll be sold out until next year. I finally track down some at the Hoboken Family Pharmacy and pay $155 for 120 tablets. On the PATH train back, I ponder my good fortune in finding a pharmacy with the drug available, and in being so overprescribed. The blue pills in my pocket practically scream, “Sell me!”

Though the Bible says that rich people getting into heaven is as likely as squeezing a 1500-pound mammal through a tiny hole, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of billionaires made their fortunes from scratch. It’s also worth noting how unbelievably lazy today’s kids can be. I’ve been hiring twenty-somethings for about twenty years now, and though they are getting more tech-savvy, their productivity keeps plummeting. I believe this is due to their snowballing sense of entitlement. Here are ten lessons I’ve learned after watching kids in their early twenties acting hyper-entitled

MB: She began raking her teeth lightly against my arms and legs which was indescribably erotic. Some might find it frightening, I found it erotic. DF: Now in your book, you talk about how that led on to you two having sex. A lot of people would say that’s wrong, what’s right in your mind about what you did? MB: What was right with it is that the dolphin initiated the whole sexual thing. As I mentioned, she was in isolation – she’d be using me to satisfy her sexual needs.

A sleazy 75-year-old Australian landlord was caught lurking in an air vent with a camera — filming his young tenants having sex, the Manly Daily reported Thursday. Bruno Silvolli, of Narrabeen in Sydney, also cut holes in the bathroom wall of his tenants’ apartment so he could spy on those inside. The married man is due for sentencing in January after pleading guilty in the Manly Court to several counts of filming and watching without consent, as well as indecently assaulting a female tenant. He first came to police attention last year when a young couple, who were renting the apartment below Silvolli’s home, reported the old man had groped the woman’s breast while she hung washing out and later exposed himself.

It sat in front of him, on top of a pillow that rested on a milk crate. He sprinkled baby powder on it — what looked like a huge watermelon encased in a compression bandage — but the unmistakable smell of urine couldn’t be completely smothered. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” 47-year-old Wesley Warren Jr. said in the poorly lit apartment. “It’s freakish.” What sat in front of where Warren was seated in shorts — what is actually attached to him — was more than 100 pounds of scrotum, the protective sac of skin and muscle that contains his testicles.

Micro-injuries to the penis are a well-recognized risk factor for the development of penile cancer. Such physical trauma could explain how sex with animals causes the cancer. “We think that the intense and long-term SWA practice could produce micro-traumas in the human penile tissue,” Zequi said. “The genital mucus membranes of animals could have different characteristics from human genitalia, and the animals’ secretions are probably different from human fluids. Perhaps animal tissues are less soft than ours, and non-human secretions would be toxic for us,” he explained.

An increasing number of young adults were found to be buying a drug they refer to as “bubble”, once a street name for mephedrone but now a term for any white powder. Users are uncertain about what they are taking and any potential health risks. “We found that one in 10 of the young adults questioned had taken mephedrone within the past year and one in 20 within the past month,” said Dr Fiona Measham, who led the study. “In the case of the next generation of ‘legal highs’, no clear substitute for mephedrone has emerged. Instead, there was uncertainty, confusion and a degree of disinterest. In this vacuum, bubble has emerged and evolved as a generic term used in the north of England to refer to any unknown white powders which are synthetic stimulants.” Thanks Cat

A British rock music fan stabbed himself to death after a night out watching U.S. band Them Crooked Vultures left him with severe tinnitus, a coroner’s investigation reported. Robert McIndoe, 52, was unable to sleep for three months after seeing the band – made up of former band members from Led Zeppelin, Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age – at the Brixton Academy, south London. His psychiatrist, Dr. Helen Stinson, said, “He accepted death as a side-effect of stopping the noise,” the Daily Mirror reported Friday. The inquest heard he tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose at his home in south London in the same month that he fatally stabbed himself. McIndoe’s wife Shirley said, “He just wanted not to be suffering.”

Back in 1969, Joey Skaggs, a famed conceptual artist and media prankster, created a bra that was reportedly 120 feet long — 50 feet for the cups alone — as a statement about America’s fixation on breasts.

☆ Crystal Harris: Sex with Hef lasted ‘two seconds’

Crystal Harris is moving on from Hugh Hefner, but not without taking a few parting shots at her former fiancé.

Harris, 24, said Tuesday on Sirius XM Radio’s Howard Stern Show that sex with the 85-year-old Playboy founder lasted “like two seconds.”

“Then I was just over it,” she says. “I was like, ‘Ahhh.’ I was over it. I just like, walked away. I’m not turned on by Hef, sorry.”

She adds that they had sex just once.

“He doesn’t really take off his clothes,” Harris says. “I’ve never seen Hef naked.”

☆ Boone County Career and Technical Center Closed after Meth Residue Found

Former school teacher Jack Turley and former school principal Keith Phipps are facing misdemeanor charges and are accused of buying cold medicine to cook meth on school property. Turley’s preliminary hearing in the case was July 1, but it was stopped when defense attorneys tried to dismiss the case on a technicality.

Turley told state police during an investigation that they used meth in Phipps’ office at the school.

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade (Odyssey) scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public

One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Mr. Ramrattan was arrested.

But he soon took his revenge, the authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen.

One night, Ms. Sumasar was pulled over by the police. Before she could speak, detectives slapped handcuffs on her. “You know you did it,” she said one later shouted at her. “Just admit it.”

Ms. Sumasar, a former Morgan Stanley analyst who was running a restaurant, said she had no idea what that meant. Yet suddenly, she was being treated like a brazen criminal. She was charged with carrying out a series of armed robberies, based on what the police said was a wealth of evidence, including credible witness statements and proof that her car was the getaway vehicle.

Researchers reported: “Only with respect to the immediate recall measure was there evidence of an improved performance associated with sustained abstinence from cannabis, with outcomes similar to those who had never used cannabis at the end point. On the remaining cognitive measures, after controlling for education and other characteristics, there were no significant differences associated with cannabis consumption.”

They concluded, “Therefore, the adverse impacts of cannabis use on cognitive functions either appear to be related to pre-existing factors or are reversible in this community cohort even after potentially extended periods of use.”

The 18-year-old victim received a 1.5-inch gash across her buttocks, police said.

The woman said she was shopping when she noticed clothing that had fallen from a rack behind her and then a man bending down to pick up the fallen items. She then felt a sharp pain in her buttocks, but thought she might have been poked by one of the clothes hangers. A short time later, she realized that her denim shorts had been slashed and that she was cut and bleeding.

☆ More Faces of Meth (New Photos)

Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse, the former chief oversight official of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, has reached a $970,000 settlement six years after she was demoted for publicly criticizing a multi-billion-dollar, no-bid contract to Halliburton—the company formerly headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Greenhouse had accused the Pentagon of unfairly awarding the contract to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. Testifying before Congress in June 2005, she called the contract the worst case of government abuse she had ever witnessed in her 20-year career. Just two months after that testimony, Greenhouse was demoted at the Pentagon, ostensibly for “poor performance.” She had overseen government contracts for 20 years and had drawn high praise in her rise to become the senior civilian oversight official at the Army Corps of Engineers. With the help of the National Whistleblowers Center, Greenhouse filed a lawsuit challenging her demotion.

Lieder originally called the bringer of doom “Planet X,” and later connected it to a planet that was hypothesized to exist by a writer named Zecharia Sitchin in his book “The 12th Planet” (Harper 1976). According to Sitchin (1920-2010), the ancient Sumerians wrote about a giant planet called Nibiru — the “twelfth planet” in the solar system, after the other planets (including Pluto), the sun and moon — which has an oblong orbit that swings near Earth every 3,600 years. Humans actually evolved on Nibiru, he said, and colonized this planet during a previous flyby.

Google’s Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed.

The cars were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points. But Google also recorded the street addresses and unique identifiers of computers and other devices using those wireless networks and then made the data publicly available through Google.com until a few weeks ago.

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has found the very first asteroid that (more or less) shares an orbit with Earth! Called 2010 TK7, this asteroid is about 300 meters (roughly 1000 feet) across, and is the first in an up-to-now theoretical class of objects called Earth Trojans.

The 63 year-old man, whose name is not being released, was trying to remove a protruding hernia from his stomach using a six inch butter knife, Glendale police Sgt. Tom Lorenz tells KTLA.

San Francisco police announced late last week that Kenneth Harding might have taken his own life during a shootout with Bayview police, a revelation that only adds to the confusion surrounding the young man’s death and residents’ anger over the second police shooting in as many weeks.

Tension between the community and San Francisco Police Department is already running high following the incident, which began with a Muni fare inspection and ended with the 19-year-old bleeding to death in front of police armed with weapons and bystanders armed with cell phone cameras. More than 300 people attended a town hall meeting with Police Chief Greg Suhr at the Bayview Opera House last Wednesday, but a chorus of booing and demands for answers by frustrated residents prevented the officer from giving his presentation.

A young Chinese couple has sold all three of their children in exchange for money to play online games at Internet cafes, reports a southern Chinese newspaper. According to Sanxiang City News, the couple met in an Internet cafe back in 2007 and bonded over their obsession with online video games. A year later, the parents — who are both under 21 — welcomed their first child, a son. Days after his birth, they left him home alone while they went to play online games at an Internet cafe 30 km away. In 2009, Li Lin and Li Juan welcomed their second child, a baby girl, and came up with the idea to sell her for money to fund their online game obsession. They did so, receiving RMB 3,000 (less than $500), which they spent entirely shortly after. The couple then proceeded to sell their first child and got 10 times as much for him — RMB 30,000, or about $4600. Upon having their third child — another boy — the parents followed in their previous footsteps and also got RMB 30,000 for him.

The first prototype of the Infinity Burial Suit is a body suit embroidered with thread infused with mushroom spores. The embroidery pattern resembles the dendritic growth of mushroom mycelium. The Suit is accompanied by an Alternative Embalming Fluid, a liquid spore slurry, and Decompiculture Makeup, a two-part makeup consisting of a mixture of dry mineral makeup and dried mushroom spores and a separate liquid culture medium. Combining the two parts and applying them to the body activates the mushroom spores to develop and grow.﻿

FAMILY campaigners last night blasted a group for teaching pole dancing to girls aged SEVEN – and putting pictures of them on the net.

The photos show youngsters upside down on poles dressed in shorts, crop tops and vests.

Parents must agree before the images are posted on Facebook.

The panel of 27 scientists, who considered the latest research from all areas of marine science, concluded that a “combination of stressors is creating the conditions associated with every previous major extinction of species in Earth’s history”. They also concluded:

* The speed and rate of degeneration of the oceans is far faster than anyone has predicted;

* Many of the negative impacts identified are greater than the worst predictions;

* The first steps to globally significant extinction may have already begun.

“The findings are shocking,” said Dr Alex Rogers, professor of conservation biology at Oxford University and IPSO’s scientific director. “As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

In the Real-American stronghold of South Carolina, of all places, a 65-year-old woman has been accused of violating the state obscenity law by hanging a pair of Truck Nutz plastic testicles from the back of her pickup truck. What’s next, a ban on the American flag?

In the state of Wisconsin, you may be denied the ability to vote for lack of sufficient recent “bank activity”. A woman surreptitiously filmed the interactions as her 18-year-old son leaps through hurdle after hurdle in an attempt to get a constitutionally-guaranteed state ID so that he could vote. At the DMV, the pair is told that voter IDs were not issued when voters’ bank accounts did not show enough “activity.” The clerk had no answer when asked what would happen in the case of a resident who was homeless or unemployed, or too poor to maintain the minimum balance required for a checking account.

But what was I even talking about in this post again? Hustler’s dirty little beauty secret: right-o. OK, so this was the best information my ex-friend (well, we weren’t REALLY friends but he did send me free issues) from Hustler told me! He said that in the money shots — don’t pretend that you don’t know what those are — the “jizz” that’s everywhere not real bodily fluid at all! It is actually just …

As well as seeing a reported 20K-plus users close their PayPal accounts, Anonymous’ new OpPayPal has led to an alleged $1 billion loss for PayPal’s parent company eBay.

The new, entirely legal campaign, began earlier today when Anonymous called for “anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative.”

The campaign was reportedly motivated by the FBI and PayPal’s treatment of alleged Anonymous hacker Mercedes Renee Haefer. The American journalism student was arrested by the FBI earlier this week for involvement in a number of Anonymous led hacks.

Since it began, Anonymous has publicised the event via Twitter. A primary goal of the protest was to affect eBay’s stock value.

☆ Human Baby Eaten In China [Pictures]

Can’t Unsee! …I think it’s fake

In Dunn County, North Dakota, the roads can kill you. In fact, anything you do to disturb rocks in the area, like driving or even sweeping, can kick up naturally-occurring particles that lodge in your body and give you a rare kind of lung cancer up to 30 years later. Dunn County, you see, is home to a lot of rocks containing erionite, an asbestos-like substance that’s highly toxic. Unfortunately, nobody knew that until very recently. And so at least 300 miles of roads in North Dakota are paved with the stuff.

What do you do when you discover that you’ve built your county’s infrastructure out of poison rocks?

Manufacturer Boeing says it has inked a teaming agreement with the US operations of arms globo-mammoth BAE Systems to build the Mk 38 Mod 2 Tactical Laser System to naval requirements. We learn that the new raygun installation will be based on the existing Mk 38 Machine Gun System, a robotic gun turret whose primary punch is provided by the fearsome M242 Bushmaster Chain Gun, effectively a light auto-cannon.

The new enhanced laser version will also boast a high-energy laser intended for such tasks as raying small flying robots and/or boats:

The addition of the laser weapon module brings high-precision accuracy against surface and air targets such as small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles. The system also provides the ability to deliver different levels of laser energy, depending on the target and mission objectives.

☆ Who Are The Bankers That Benefit From The Norway Terror Attacks?

Yesterday, alleged terrorist Breivik had his day in court, and just as he started to mention that he had accomplices in the attacks, the judge silenced him and order him to 4 weeks in isolation before his trial. Why? Wouldn’t the people of Norway have a right to know who helped that crazed man carry out the terror attacks? It is obvious that he had assistance; the attacks had to require some level of sophistication and professional planning. But rather than focusing on Breivik’s background, because we may never know the whole truth about him, let’s examine who benefits from these horrendous attacks.

Swartz, 24, faces 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine under the indictment, announced last week, raising questions about his intentions, the vagueness of anti-hacking statutes and copyright as it applies to academic work.

But the indictment (embedded below) also left one other question unresolved: How did Swartz get caught?

The answer, it turns out, involves a webcam stakeout, the Secret Service and a campus-wide manhunt for a slender guy with a backpack riding a bike on MIT’s campus.

British police announced today that they arrested a 19-year-old hacker in Scotland’s isolated Shetland Islands who used the nickname “Topiary” online. Here’s what we know about this core member of the hacking group Lulz Security, from interviews and leaked chat transcripts.

Topiary was the most visible member of the world’s most visible hacking group. Earlier this year Lulz Security captivated the internet with a 50 day hacking spree in which they attacked the FBI, the CIA, and Sony, leaked tens of thousands of emails and passwords, boasting all the while on its massively popular Twitter account. Topiary was a LulzSec cofounder, the group’s unofficial spokesman and aesthetic center. The last two were crucial roles in a group that relied as much on media savviness as hacking ability. He also helped fund LulzSec operations.

A spokesman for police in the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo says staff at the prison in Chetumal noticed that the woman seemed nervous and was pulling a black, wheeled suitcase that looked bulky.

“These stores are trying to trick people into thinking they need an HDMI lead costing over £100 after buying a Full HD TV. This is simply not the case. You shouldn’t be spending more than £4 on an HDMI cable,” it said.

“An HDMI cable is an HDMI cable,” Kogan added. “It’s a digital cable. You either get a picture or you don’t. Don’t get conned into buying a ‘fancy’ HDMI cable because it will make no difference!”

The use of wiretaps is on the rise, according to a government report released Thursday.

The number of state and federal wiretaps reported swelled by 34 percent from 2009 to 2010, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts report said. Of the 3,194 wiretaps authorized in 2010, 1,987 were approved by state judges and 1,207 were granted by federal judges. A single application was rejected in 2010.

More than 80 percent of applications in 2010 involved drug cases. California, New York and New Jersey attributed to 68 percent of the state court applications.

Outside, the global position system allows mobile phone users to pinpoint their location with surprising accuracy.

But indoors, those who are lost are out of luck: GPS satellite signals can’t penetrate roofs.

Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science have determined one way of figuring out your location inside: by letting your phone listen. Their new mobile phone app, called Batphone, allows users to record ambient noise in a room and tag it with an acoustic fingerprint, which allows future users to use that database of fingerprints to determine their location.

More than six months have passed since Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and others cut WikiLeaks’ purse strings. And if that blockade lasts six more days, the secret-spilling group plans to take its financial fight to the courtroom.

If Visa Europe and MasterCard Europe haven’t re-opened payment WikiLeaks by next Thursday, the group and its payment provider DataCell plan to file a complaint with the E.U. Commission against the two companies as well as the Danish payment processor Teller, according to Sveinn Andri Sveinsson, the Icelandic lawyer for WikiLeaks and DataCell.

“They’re boycotting Datacell and Wikileaks without any objective justification,” says Sveinsson. “This is clearly an abuse of their market dominance.”

Facebook Friend Exporter is a Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour, an open source software engineer, that lets you grab all the information about your Facebook friends so you can import them elsewhere. Because it got popular recently, Facebook noticed and began to block the extension.

But incredibly he escaped with his life.

The man took the full force of the blast yesterday but his heavy body armour saved him from serious injury as the vehicle disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and flame.

In the years following the 1979 reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, more than 50 reactor projects were cancelled across the United States. While many of these reactors had yet to move beyond the planning stages, a number of units that were well into construction were cancelled and abandoned. Closer regulatory scrutiny after the accident combined with a difficult economy to make a host of half-completed projects unviable, and left their wreckage strewn across remote farmland and fog-choked coniferous forests from Tennessee to Washington state.

Graduates from Royal College of Art have discovered a way to turn hair cuttings, that parlours throw away as waste, into sustainable eyewear named “Hair Glasses”.

Throughout the months of lies and misinformation, one story has stuck: “The earthquake knocked out the plant’s electric power, halting cooling to its reactors,” as the government spokesman Yukio Edano said at a March 15 press conference in Tokyo. The story, which has been repeated again and again, boils down to this: “after the earthquake, the tsunami – a unique, unforeseeable [the Japanese word is soteigai] event – then washed out the plant’s back-up generators, shutting down all cooling and starting the chain of events that would cause the world’s first triple meltdown to occur.”

But what if recirculation pipes and cooling pipes, burst, snapped, leaked, and broke completely after the earthquake — long before the tidal wave reached the facilities, long before the electricity went out? This would surprise few people familiar with the 40-year-old Unit 1, the grandfather of the nuclear reactors still operating in Japan.

Then Picard handed me a pair of special glasses. The instant I put them on I discovered that I had got it all terribly wrong. That look of admiration, I realised, was actually confusion and disagreement. Worse, she was bored out of her mind. I became privy to this knowledge because a little voice was whispering in my ear through a headphone attached to the glasses. It told me that Picard was “confused” or “disagreeing”. All the while, a red light built into the specs was blinking above my right eye to warn me to stop talking. It was as though I had developed an extra sense.

The brain works differently when memorizing the face of a person from one’s own race than when attempting to remember the face of someone of another race, new biological evidence suggests.

The well-documented “other-race effect” finds that people are less likely to remember a face from a racial group different from their own. Northwestern University researchers set out to determine what causes this rift in perception and memory by using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, which measure brain activity, while participants viewed photos of various faces.

The presidential seal fell off US President Barack Obama’s lectern, clattering to the stage, as he delivered a speech at a women’s conference on Tuesday.

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

The Obama campaign website was hacked on Tuesday and invited supporters to two fake anti-government events hosted by an unnamed “Commy Obama.”

The campaign’s application for mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads, directed users to two events titled “Rules of Politics” scheduled for noon on Tuesday in Washington.

“1. Politicians and other public servants lie,” read the event description provided on the Obama campaign website. (Full screenshot here.) “2. Politicians tell you what you want to hear and offer to provide things for ‘free’ to get votes. 3. When government buys, the people pay.”

The 430-word message lists 21 total anti-government criticisms, none of which target Obama, another politician or a particular political party by name.

Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, a vice chairman of Egypt’s Wafd Party, made the remarks in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times last week while in the Hungarian capital attending the Conference on Democracy and Human Rights.

He denied that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II.

“The Holocaust is a lie” Mr. Ezz El-Arab said. “The Jews under German occupation were 2.4 million. So if they were all exterminated, where does the remaining 3.6 million come from?”

Mr. Ezz El-Arab said he accepted that the Nazis killed “hundreds of thousands” of Jews. “But gas chambers and skinning them alive and all this? Fanciful stories,” he added. (AUDIO: on the Holocaust)

Mr. Ezz El-Arab also attacked the authenticity of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which he said he studied as a doctoral student in Stockholm. “I could swear to God it’s a fake,” the Wafd leader said. “The girl was there, but the memoirs are a fake.”

The Mayor is challenged under a recall election beginning next month. Accusations have been made. The city council is persecuting the Mayor for giving the people a voice. The Chief of Police is also involved in the scandal.

Jennifer Jones is given the floor at a city council meeting open to the public. While she is speaking the council realizes she’s about to air their dirty laundry and quickly beckons their henchman to cart her off.

The Mayor steps in and says Jones has been recognized to speak and has not violated the council’s rules, but the council ignores him and has the woman removed even as the Mayor continues to contest. The police officers ignore the Mayor of the city and remove the woman. It’s obvious who those cops work for, and it’s not the people.

If we ever want to turn this country around, we need to be very honest with ourselves. We need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and realize that it is not a good thing that we are number one in divorce, drug addiction, debt, obesity, car thefts, murders and total crimes. We have become a slothful, greedy, decadent nation that is exhibiting signs of advanced decay. Until we understand just how bad our problems really are, we won’t be able to come up with the solutions that we need.

A lot of people that write articles like this have a deep hatred for America. But that is not the case with me. I love the United States. I love the American people. America is like an aging, bloated rock star that has become addicted to a dozen different drugs. America is a shadow of its former self and it desperately needs to wake up before it plunges into oblivion.

The Army’s $2.7 billion computing system designed to share real-time intelligence with troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has hurt, rather than helped, efforts to fight insurgents because it doesn’t work properly, several analysts who have used the system say.

The Federal Reserve is primarily concerned with one thing and that is to protect the interests of the banking industry. The Fed has no desire or need to protect the underlying economy. If they can get away with allowing banks to jump from one bubble to another they will do so. The success of the overall economy is only consequential if it aligns with the deeper interests of the banking cabal. This weekend former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan mentioned that simply bailing out Greece was a temporary measure. When pressed he went back into “Greenspeak” and rambled on in his typical obtuse language. The reason why global banks fear Greece is not because of the country itself, but because the country has billions of dollars in debt that global banks hold. These banks do not want to pay for their bad bets and would rather shift the cost to the overall population in general. The Fed balance sheet here in the U.S. is now up to $2.84 trillion, another record that gets no airtime in the press.

Police in Sharpsville on Monday charged 23-year-old Joseph Lombardi with trying to “purchase” a bag of herbal potpourri called “Space Cadet Flight Risk” using the bogus bill at a FoodMart store.

Think you did some crazy stuff when you were using? From horse-painting to firewalking to “smudging,” the “therapies” offered by some of the ritziest rehabs may make your pre-sobriety days look positively tame.

THE psychedelic era of the 1960s is remembered for its music, its art and, of course, its drugs. Its science is somewhat further down the list. But before the rise of the counterculture, researchers had been studying LSD as a treatment for everything from alcoholism to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), with promising results.

Pure Pleasure!

Seven-Up is so pure…so wholesome!

For a fact, you can even give this sparkling drink to babies—and without any qualms. Lots of mothers do just that!

Just read the ingredients on the 7-Up bottle and you’ll see why. We’re proud to list them for your inspection, even though regulations don’t require this on soft drinks.

Seven-Up has a special fresh, clean taste that appeals to everyone at your house—be he nine months, nine years or ninety. It’s the All-Family drink!

☛ Didn’t pick up after your dog? DNA will tell

A Florida condominium association hopes dog DNA samples will help them determine which pet owners aren’t picking up after their pooches.

The Village of Abacoa Condominium Association says cleaning up after dog owners who don’t clean up after their dogs costs $10,000 to $12,000 a year.

Starting Aug. 1, residents in the Jupiter community must each pay a $200 fee to keep the dogs’ genetic information on file at the DNA Pet World Registry. Dog droppings found in common areas will be collected and mailed to the Tennessee-based company for comparison.

From pornographic names to subtle vulgarity to tragic unibrows, these old baseball cards remind us of why we used to collect them.

I was asked by an aspiring writer whether at this point it’s still worth it as a writer to own one’s own domain, i.e., in the age of everyone being on Facebook, setting up one’s online shingle elsewhere is like opening a business on a dusty street a mile away from Main Street.

My thought on this: Hey, remember when everyone was on America Online? And then everyone was on Friendster? And then everyone was on MySpace? And now everyone’s on Facebook? Yeah, you’ll notice a pattern here, perhaps.

Yes, but Facebook is huge, you say, with unspeakably large numbers of users worldwide and a valuation of $70 billion.

Wow, I say, just like America Online was huge, with an unspeakably large number of users online and a valuation of over $100 billion.

As he approached the black Mazda 626, the Precinct 8 deputy noticed the driver had blood on his face. He also saw that the front windshield was shattered and partially inside the vehicle.

The deputy constable then saw a body in the passenger seat, partially underneath the dashboard and with a severed leg.

Think about it. We have less privacy and freedom than any generation in history.

The government and big corporations know your every move. They know where you work, how much you own, how much you owe, where you go and what you buy. They know where you are, who you’re talking to and what you’re saying. They know what books and blogs you’re reading and what movies and TV you’re watching, and who your “friends” are. You are tracked by your cellphone, judged by your FICO score and monitored by your iPad. Your government ID number — known as your Social Security number — means that they can tie all these things together and trace them right back to you.

Yet here was Whitey Bulger — the most hunted American in history — living a comfortable, middle-class life just blocks from the beach, right under Big Brother’s big nose. And they didn’t have a clue.

Whatever you think of Whitey, that’s something.

Today I had nothing to do so I decided to visit my county government’s website. The front page news item was about the high standard repair of the public road that passes through the rural country but upon clicking and seeing the photo, I spit out half a liter of blood!

This kind of image even I who can’t be any more amateur than I am can tell it is PSed, and they even thought it was a good idea to put it on the home page, even putting it as the topmost/first item! Perhaps it is because they don’t think anyone will look at their home page!

“I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated…”

– Ed Sullivan introducing the apocalyptic short film A SHORT VISION on the May 27, 1956 broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show

“Years later I met a man from Canada who had shoulder length dark hair, but in the center of his head was a small spot where his hair grew out a silvery white color. I asked him about it, and he told me that he was a medically documented case of a person whose hair had turned white from fright. As a child, he had seen A SHORT VISION while alone in a house, and he experienced extreme panic and terror for some time, and one result was that his hair began to grow out white from that one spot on his head.”

Russian scientists expect humanity to encounter alien civilisations within the next two decades, a top Russian astronomer said on Monday.

“The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms … Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years,” said Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Applied Astronomy Institute, according to the Interfax news agency.

Speaking at an international forum dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, Finkelstein said 10% of the known planets circling suns in the galaxy resemble Earth.

If water can be found there, then so can life, he said, adding that aliens would most likely resemble humans with two arms, two legs and a head.

“They may have different colour skin, but even we have that,” he said.

The four and a half minute compliation of every Ray Harryhausen animated creature in feature films, presented in chronological order.

It’s an embarrassment of riches. A receipt – showing a astounding $100 million savings balance- was left behind at an East End bank by an arrogant mogul who couldn’t be bothered to pick it up after withdrawing $400 and paying a $2.75 ATM fee.

It was found sticking out of the slot at the Capital One Bank in East Hampton Village by the next customer — who turned it over to the financial tabloid Web site Dealbreaker.com.

Besides documenting an amazing $99,864,731.94 savings account, it illustrates one truth that every New Yorker knows — no matter who you are or how much you have, you can’t escape ATM fees.

“These people were some of the most hateful people I have ever seen,” said a distraught Glenn Beck this morning as he described an altercation he and his family had last night while watching a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in New York’s Bryant Park. Explaining that a group of people yelled at his family, took pictures of them, and kicked a cup of wine onto his wife, Beck said that his security team feels that, had he reacted poorly, things might have “gone off.”

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables. The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand.

Olwell adds that creating the billboard demanded the “most visceral approaches”. “They do not have language or culture and they have very short attention spans,” he says. “We really had to strip out any hip and current thinking and get to the absolute core of what is advertising.”

And visceral is exactly what the team has gone for — working to the age-old mantra that sex sells. The billboards will not be made public until after the experiment has come to an end but: “One billboard shows a graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed, alongside the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the Capuchin troop associated with brand A.”

A bizarre video where a gay activist claims he was prevented from taking part in the upcoming Gaza-bound flotilla because of his sexual orientation has been exposed as an Israeli hoax.

It appears to be the latest in a dirty-tricks campaign that includes sabotage and legal challenges orchestrated by groups seeking to derail and discredit efforts by activists to sail into Gaza’s waters to challenge Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory.

Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.

Secret Codes ‘Everywhere’

The brochure, which is published by a Berlin-based anti-racism group, Agentur für Soziale Perspektiven, lists 150 codes that are used by right-wing extremists, including certain clothing labels such as Thor Steinar and letter and number combinations. According to Weiss, the number 14 is a reference to the so-called “14 Words,” a phrase coined by the American white separatist David Lane (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”). The meaning behind “88” — often found in conjunction with 14 — is slightly more complicated. Here, the number eight stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, forming “HH” — an abbreviation for “Heil Hitler,” a phrase which is banned in Germany. Similarly, the number 28 signifies “BH,” standing for “Blood and Honour,” a far-right network that was banned in Germany in 2000.

John Lennon was a closet Republican, who felt a little embarrassed by his former radicalism, at the time of his death – according to the tragic Beatles star’s last personal assistant.

Fred Seaman worked alongside the music legend from 1979 to Lennon’s death at the end of 1980 and he reveals the star was a Ronald Reagan fan who enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self.

Girls are being ‘converted’ into boys in Indore – by the hundreds every year – at ages where they cannot give their consent for this life-changing operation. This shocking, unprecedented trend, catering to the fetish for a son, is unfolding at conservative Indore’s well-known clinics and hospita ls on children who are 1-5 years old. The process being used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty. Each surgery costs Rs 1.5 lakh.

☛ Special Report: A little house of secrets on the Great Plains

At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn’t a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It’s a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn, a few blocks from the State Capitol.

Neighbors say they see little activity there besides regular mail deliveries and a woman who steps outside for smoke breaks. Inside, however, the walls of the main room are covered floor to ceiling with numbered mailboxes labeled as corporate “suites.” A bulky copy machine sits in the kitchen. In the living room, a woman in a headset answers calls and sorts bushels of mail.

A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as “shell” companies, paper entities able to hide assets.

Thanks King Solomon

“You take an oath of office to obey the Constitution… the Constitution is very clear, you don’t go to war without a declaration,” he said. “I agree there is some confusion with the War Powers Resolution, because technically it legalized war rather than prevented war, so I don’t particularly like that bill.”

You can have all the firewalls and Internet security software in the world, but sometimes there’s just no accounting for human curiosity and stupidity.

Bloomberg reports that The US Department of Homeland recently ran a test on government employees to see how easy it was for hackers to gain access to computer systems, without the need for direct network access.

Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers. And if the drive or CD had an official logo on it, 90% were installed.

☛ FBI: Anti-gay group participated in training

The FBI said Wednesday that members of an anti-gay fundamentalist group participated in the bureau’s training of police officers and FBI agents – a move the bureau says it will take steps to remedy in the future.

The bureau extended the invitations to Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., for training this spring at two bureau facilities in Virginia: Quantico and Manassas.

Westboro has stirred widespread outrage with raucous demonstrations at the funerals of U.S. military service members. The group contends God is punishing the military for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.

National Public Radio first reported the FBI’s involvement with Westboro.

Greenpeace has slammed Volkswagen’s environmental record by claiming that the giant carmaker has stalled on fuel efficiency gains and is attempting to thwart an EU plan to dramatically lower CO2 emissions by 2020.

In its report, ‘The Dark Side of Volkswagen’, Greenpeace complains that Europe’s largest car manufacturer has purposely restricted its most fuel efficient engines to a tiny minority of vehicles, and then drastically increased the price for consumers.

The scale of the problem in Latin America is not known, but a recent survey of emergency hospital admissions in Bogotá, Colombia, found that around 70 per cent of patients drugged with burundanga had also been robbed, and around three per cent sexually assaulted. “The most common symptoms are confusion and amnesia,” says Juliana Gomez, a Colombian psychiatrist who treats victims of burundanga poisoning. “It makes victims disoriented and sedated so they can be easily robbed.” Medical evidence verifies this, but news reports allude to another, more sinister, effect: that the drug removes free will, effectively turning victims into suggestible human puppets. Although not fully understood by neuroscience, free will is seen as a highly complex neurological ability and one of the most cherished of human characteristics. Clearly, if a drug can eliminate this, it highlights a stark vulnerability at the core of our species.

There is one entire country, however, that Google Earth won’t show you: Israel.

That’s because, in 1997, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, one section of which is titled, “Prohibition on collection and release of detailed satellite imagery relating to Israel.” The amendment, known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, calls for a federal agency, the NOAA’s Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs, to regulate the dissemination of zoomed-in images of Israel.

When asked about the regulation, a Google spokeswoman said to Mother Jones, “The images in Google Earth are sourced from a wide range of both commercial and public sources. We source our satellite imagery from US-based companies who are subject to US law, including the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997, which limits the resolution of imagery of Israel that may be commercially distributed.”

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person’s gaze, to judge a subject’s state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.

Human organs could be grown inside pigs for use in transplant operations following research using stem cells.

TEPCO was able to control information through the age-old system of Press Clubs, where the government provides information to selected media.

But The Mail on Sunday spoke to sources inside the Japanese nuclear industry who knew that radiation readings spiked 155 miles south of Fukushima, immediately after the first explosion. They were told by officials to keep the findings quiet.

A survey by Fuji Television Network last month found that 81 per cent of the public no longer trusts any government information about radiation.

Despite reports that it was a war with the loose online collective Anonymous, today hacker group LulzSec has announced it is to team up with the online community to begin “Operation Anti-Security”, a declaration which will see it attack any government or agency that “crosses their path”.

LulzSec, famous for compromising the servers of Fox, Sony, the CIA, PBS and a number of other websites, announced its plans in its usual fashion, posting a release to Pastebin and then tweeting the link from its 217,000 strong Twitter account.

As part of the campaign, LulzSec encourages attackers to compromise government websites and flaunt the word “AntiSec”, prompting interested parties to consider tagging buildings with the same phrase with physical graffiti art. Uniting all that wish to join them, the hacker group wants acts of corruption exposed, all in the name of Anti-Security.

☆ Japan pumps water into reactor to contain radioactivity

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which runs the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, started Sunday to pour water into a pool on the top floor of reactor 4 of the six-reactor plant after it discovered the water level had dropped to about one-third of its capacity, public broadcaster NHK reported.

The drop caused equipment in the pool to be exposed, releasing high levels of radiation, officials said.

The radiation levels at reactor 4 have been preventing workers from entering the structure to conduct repairs.

TEPCO also began late Sunday to release air containing radioactive substances from the building of reactor 2 by opening its doors.

An estimated 1.6 billion becquerels of radioactive materials were released, compared with 500 million becquerels when the double doors of the building of reactor 1 were opened in May, the Jiji Press agency reported, citing TEPCO.

The operator denied that the releases would have an impact on the environment.

Today the National Association of the Deaf, the nation’s premier civil rights organization of deaf and hard of hearing individuals, filed a lawsuit against Netflix, charging that the entertainment company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by failing to provide closed captioning for most of its “Watch Instantly” movies and television shows that are streamed over the internet. An estimated 36 million Americans are deaf or hard of hearing and, as noted in a press release about the lawsuit, many had repeatedly appealed to Netflix via letters, petitions and social media tools.

We now know that Nato is using Twitter as a source of intelligence. We know that people are posting coordinates of potential targets to Nato.

But we do not know how Nato uses Twitter. Are there accounts out there covertly operated by intelligence officials under pseudonyms, engaging with tweeters?

Are you aware of accounts which may be being used by Nato to gather intelligence from Libya? Do you have examples of tweeters posting coordinates of locations which are then targeted by Nato air strikes?

President Obama is expected to announcewithin a week if and how many combat troops he plans to withdraw from the war in Afghanistan. Some of those who will be most impacted by the decision are U.S. soldiers and their families and Afghans who have been dealing with the ramifications of the war for nearly a decade.

Yet the war is affecting more than just Western soldiers and their families and Afghan citizens. It has become a costly drain on our nation’s treasury; the money that is being spent on the war represents resources that are being drained away from important domestic priorities in a nation with sky-high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure.

“When I stubbed my toe, it felt like someone slammed it with a hammer,” says Shawn, still shaken by the recollection.

At first he thought the problem was “all in his head” and he could “tough it out.” But after several days, when the pain had not diminished, he went to his doctor. The diagnosis—opioid-induced hyperalgesia—was so bizarre that it might have been lifted from the plot of a horror movie. The painkillers had not merely lost their effect—they had triggered a syndrome of hypersensitivity to pain, even to stimuli that previously had not registered as painful.

Opiate-induced hyperalgesia is what doctors call “a paradoxical phenomenon,” a drug having the reverse effect than intended. After decades of heroin abuse topped off by a medical course of OxyContin and other prescription opiates for pain, the accumulated damage caused certain receptors in Shawn’s central nervous system leading to certain pathways in his brain pathways to hit critical mass. His pain wiring went haywire.

Years of weak regulation, a lack of legislation and no prescription-drug-monitoring program — combined with doctors who liberally prescribe narcotics — helped make Florida the poster child for the prescription-drug epidemic.